Police detain two journalists in eastern Turkey

Nismiye Güler and Zeynep Turgut, two reporters for the Diyarbakir-based multilingual online news portal, Gazete Sujin were detained on Thursday.

Two reporters were on way to cover an event in Van’s Tatvan district when police rounded them up. Gazete Sujin said it has yet to locate the police station the two are being kept.

As of April 1, 2017, Stockholm Center for Freedom (SCF), a Stockholm-based monitoring and rights advocacy group, has confirmed that 228 journalists and media workers are behind bars in Turkey, a new world record by any measure. Of these journalists, 194 are arrested pending trial and without a conviction. 13 jailed journalists have been re-detained just after they were released by an İstanbul court on March 31, 2017. Most of the journalists do not even know what the charges are or what evidence, if any, the government has because the indictments were not filed yet.

The Turkish government is apparently using arbitrary arrests as part of intimidation campaign to suppress critical coverage, muzzle independent media and silence journalists. Only 21 journalists who are in jail were convicted while the rest are in abusive and long pre-trial detentions. Moreover, sweeping detention warrants have been issued for 92 journalists who are forced to live in exile abroad or remain at large in Turkey. (SCF with turkeypurge.com) April 6, 2017